Jimi Green – 3D art and animation student @ Design Centre Enmore

Animation – Assessment 1- Process Diary – Week 7

Week 7, the last week before the mid-term break. Todays lesson was mainly about polishing and timing and putting the final touches to our weight lift animations.
With the lecturer happy with my main poses and tweens, I moved to smooth tangents. I used ‘plateau’ as this seemed to give me the best overall result without the feet dipping below the floor.
I guess the main thing I got from today’s lesson was to work slowly, one controller at a time when putting the final touches on an animation. I found it handy to compress the playback to just one tiny section at a time. Set it to loop and watch the same 15 or 20 frames over and over again to get a feel for how each section is moving, then make small timing adjustments until it flows right.
Having a stepped tangent animation looking almost right seems to be the key to making the polishing stage less dramatic.
Anyway, I could continue tweaking forever but I think I have learned what I can from this weight lift and the bouncing character and its time to move on to walk cycles which will be a whole new challenge.
This is a playblast of how the final polished weight lift is looking now-